alt Hacker NewsThis is partially fixed by making The People of the State of __________ pay for the lawyer of the defendant's choosing. It imposes real costs to the state in these cases.
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gruez • yesterday at 8:56 PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_defender_(United_States...
Of course, "of the defendant's choosing" causes all sorts of moral hazard.
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There's an argument that the cost of prosecution is one reason for the proliferation of offenses and increase in sentence lengths.
Part of that is the de facto extension of a right to jury trials for misdemeanor offenses in almost every American jurisdiction. If the defendant can force a jury trial for a misdemeanor, which is in fact quite costly for prosecutors, then the response is to raise the stakes with felony charges. Legislatures are aware of this dynamic and oblige prosecutors with more offenses and more punitive maximum penalties.
Countries like the UK and France don't have jury trials for minor offenses. (They're not as common for major offenses, either, but that's a different matter.) Sentences tend to be much shorter and it's a major reason their incarceration rate is so much lower.
I'm not against jury trials. For one thing it'd be better if juries were more local. 100+ years ago in major US cities it was more common for trials to take place within or closer to each neighborhood. Juries were often composed of people from the neighborhood. The consolidation of courts and trials in mega courthouses broke this community link; people from outside a neighborhood are systematically more harsh than they would be if judging their actual neighbors. Not because of favoritism, but because it's easier for them to appreciate the repercussions of an overly punitive system (broken families, destroyed career prospects, etc).
If you want community involvement in even minor crimes, misdemeanor jury trials can still be streamlined. You could do something similar to some European countries where a few lay judges sit alongside the professional judge, or something that used to be more common in the US where a single jury hears multiple cases each day (still a thing for indictments). But such trials would still have to dispense with alot of the procedural rigor to keep things moving along at a rapid clip.